Businesses of all scales are now moving their operations and workloads to the cloud, so as to improve their productivity. Earlier people were much reluctant to move to the cloud owing to concerns over data security and sovereignty. However, the remote work culture supported by the wide range of features offered by public cloud platforms acted as a catalyst that led to accelerated cloud adoption by businesses.
When it comes to the public cloud landscape, there is close competition between three giants, i.e, AWS, Google Cloud, and Microsoft Azure. These three cloud platforms offer a wide range of storage and computing services to businesses at an affordable cost.
With this article, we will discuss in detail the features of each cloud platform and the benefits it offers to your organization. So, if you are a business owner who is planning to make a transition to the cloud, then this article will be really helpful for you. And if you need assistance in moving your workloads from on-premise to cloud, our experts are available 24/7 to assist you.
AWS vs Azure vs Google Cloud – Comparison
There is fierce competition between the three cloud providers, i.e, AWS vs Azure vs Google Cloud for cloud dominance. However, at present AWS leads ahead of the other two in terms of functionality and market dominance. But that doesn’t mean you have to choose AWS cloud only for your business. Selecting a cloud service provider comes down to a lot of other factors as well.
Mainly it depends on the needs and requirements of your business. There are even situations where the organization uses a multi-cloud approach for carrying out its business operations.
So without any further ado, let us move on to comparing the 3 major cloud service providers based on various parameters.
1. AWS vs Azure vs Google Cloud: Zone Availability
AWS has been in the cloud market for quite some time now compared to its competitors and has 81 availability zones over 25 geographic regions as of now. Each geographic area consists of multiple, isolated availability zones that are physically separated. Each availability zone is equipped with one or more logical data centers that are available for use.
While on the other hand, both Microsoft Azure and Google cloud are available in fewer regions as compared to AWS. Google Cloud is available in almost 27 regions around the world, with many more on their way.
More the availability zones, better is the chance for businesses to deploy and run applications closer to their end-users of a specific geographic location.
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2. AWS vs Azure vs Google Cloud Pricing Models
Price is another important factor that users consider a lot while choosing a public cloud service platform. Here is a comparison of AWS vs Azure vs GCP pricing models based on the smallest and largest instances available.
Smallest instance:
AWS – 1 vCPU – 0.5GB RAM- 20 GB Storage – 1 TB bandwidth – $3.5/Month – (Free during first year)
Azure – 1 vCPU – 1.75 GB RAM – 70 GB Storage – $8.76/Month
GCP – 1 vCPU – 0.5 GB RAM – 20 GB Storage – $6/Month
Largest instance:
AWS – 448 vCPU – 6144 GB RAM- Custom Storage – $24,566/Month
Azure – 416 vCPU – 5700 GB RAM – 8 TB Storage – $9,410/Month
GCP – 416 vCPU – 11776 GB RAM – Custom Storage – $61,590/Month
3. Services Offered
The decision to choose the right public cloud providers would ultimately depend on the services they offer and the benefits it brings to your organization. So let us now look at what each service provider has got to offer in terms of services.
Among the 3 giants, AWS offers the most in terms of services. AWS offers more than 200 fully-featured services from data centers all over the globe. Azure comes second on the list in terms of the services offered. While GCP is behind the other two and is gradually catching up with them.
Services can be categorized into four types, i.e Compute, Storage, Database, and Networking.
Compute Services
Compute services can be defined as the processing power your application requires to run complex tasks.
AWS Compute Services
Following are some of the main compute services available in AWS.Amazon EC2 (Elastic Cloud Compute) – Virtual Servers that can be used to run any type of computer application.
- Amazon Lightsail- Easy-to-use virtual private servers that let you deploy applications or websites at a reduced cost.
- ECS (Elastic Container Service) – For running and easy management of Docker-based container applications.
- ECR (Elastic Container Registry) – Allows you to store, manage, share and deploy container images.
- EKS (Elastic Kubernetes Service) – Fully managed Kubernetes service that makes it easier to run Kubernetes on AWS.
- AWS Lambda- Lets you run code in response to events without having to provision or manage servers.
- AWS Fargate – Server-less compute service that provides on-demand compute capacity for containers.
- Amazon EC2 Auto-Scaling- Automatically add/ remove EC2 instances and help maintain application availability.
- AWS Batch- Fully managed services that help run jobs asynchronously across multiple compute instances.
- AWS Compute Optimizer- Provides recommendations that help users to choose optimal instance types.
- ELB (Elastic Load Balancing) – Effectively distributes traffic between server instances.
- AWS Outposts- Extends AWS services to on-premises for a hybrid cloud experience.
- AWS Beanstalk- Helps in getting your web application live and running quickly.
- Amazon EC2 Spot Instances- Unused or spare EC2 capacity in the AWS cloud that is available for a discounted price.
Azure Compute Services
Following are some of the main compute services available in Azure.
- Azure Kubernetes Services (AKS)- Fully managed container orchestration service that lets you deploy, scale, and manage container-based applications on the cloud.
- Container Instances- Allows you to easily run containers in Azure without provisioning virtual machines or using container orchestrators.
- Azure Functions – Managed FaaS that allows users to run codes that are event-triggered, i.e in response to any events.
- App Service: Fully managed PaaS offering that lets you build and host web applications and services.
- Azure Batch- Managed services that help run large-scale applications in the cloud efficiently.
- Cloud Services- Managed services for running cloud-based applications and it is an example of PaaS.
- Service Fabric- Distributed system platform that helps simplify micro-service development and application lifecycle management process.
GCP Compute Services
- App Engine – Fully managed server-less platform where developers can build scalable web and mobile backends in the programming language of their choice.
- Docker Container Registry- One single place from where you can easily store, and manage Docker container images securely.
- Instant Groups- Managed service that enables you to operate applications on multiple virtual machines (VMs).
- Compute Engine- Infrastructure as a Service component of Google that lets users launch virtual machines on demand.
- Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) – Adding GPUs to VMs allows users to accelerate specific graphics-intensive workloads on instances.
- Google Cloud Knative- Managed services that let you run server-less applications on Kubernetes clusters.
- Google Kubernetes- Cloud-based Kubernetes services that allow users to run containerized applications on the cloud.
- Cloud Functions- Server-less execution environment that helps connect cloud services.
Storage Services
AWS, GCP, and Azure offer a wide range of services that helps users to store, access, and manage their data at reduced cost and increased security. Here is the list of storage services offered by the 3 top cloud service providers.
Database Services
All the 3 service providers offer a wide range of database services that suit your application needs. Here is the list of database services offered by the 3 top cloud service providers.
Networking Services
- Amazon Virtual Private Cloud (Amazon VPC)– Amazon VPC is the networking layer for Amazon Elastic Cloud.
- Azure Virtual Network (VNET)– It is the building block for a private network in the Microsoft Azure cloud. It gives a private environment where you can run your VMs and applications.
- Cloud Virtual Network– A VPC network is a virtual version of an original physical network. It helps enhance your network security on Google Cloud.
4. AWS vs Azure vs Google Cloud: Market Share
The high market share of a business usually implies that it is providing the right services to its customers. In terms of market share, AWS is way ahead of the other two. One reason for this can be, AWS has been in the market for ages. AWS was publicly launched in 2006, while Azure and GCP were launched in 2010 and 2011 respectively. Since AWS was one of the first companies to come into the cloud domain, they had enough time to establish themselves. However, at present AWS is facing fierce competition from both Azure and Google Cloud.
According to a report by Canalys, the worldwide cloud market grew by 35% in Q1, 2021. AWS has 32% of the market, followed by Azure at 19% and GCP at 7%.
Conclusion
With this blog, we did a comparison on AWS vs Azure vs Google Cloud. We compared them based on various parameters such as pricing, services, market share, and availability. All the three service providers offer a wide range of services that meets the requirement of businesses of all scales.
The decision on which service provider to choose ultimately comes down to your specific business requirements. It is always better to choose those platforms that are able to meet your specific business requirements and support future expansions.
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